[Ue4] Welsh Valley Environment + [BreakDown] + [Tutorial]

broScience

Aye Yo Polycount!

I wanted to share my latest scene. I have been working on this project in my spare time and really wanted to share it with you all. I have both a breakdown of the scene and a tutorial on how I did procedural generation for foliage and grass in my scene. I couldn't find any tutorials on how to do this so I wanted to document the workflow and share it with other artists!

Please Leave me feedback I would love to hear from you all.

The Scene is done with Dynamic lighting in Unreal Engine 4.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg8wwb88Xeo

Breakdown

Programs used: Maya | WorldMachine | Substance Designer | SpeedTree | Photoshop | Unreal Engine 4 | Xnormal

Project Goals 

- With This project I wanted to learn how to integrate procedural generation workflows into a project as well as highly modular kitbashing. Being this projects terrain is 16 square kilometers big set dressing the scene by hand would have been a highly laborious task.

- Learning how to build appealing Terrain

- Learning how to build foliage

- Becoming comfortable with successful modular kitbashing

Materials

Dirt Path - Substance Material 



Dirt Path - Substance Nodes





Dirt Path - Texture



Unreal Engine 4 Dirt Path Material Setup



Tree Bark - Substance Material



Tree Bark - Substance Nodes



Tree Bark - Texture




SpeedTree Leaf Map Maker Materials




Grass - GeoBaked & Photoshop edited Material

To create this Material I modeled a blade of grass in Maya. From there I multiplied and modified the grass meshes, aligning them in a way that gives good foliage density and realistic patterning of grass growth. I then Baked the grass meshes onto a plane in Xnormal, creating a normal map, alpha mask and Ambient Occlusion map. From here I compiled the bakes and added coloring for material inputs in Photoshop.



In Maya the setup should resemble this appearance. 



Grass Foliage Mesh



Unreal Engine 4 - Grass Material Setup



Demonstration of Distance fade visibility culling LOD technique, with good blending to material from geometry.



Foliage within scene. Demonstration of foliage geometry mixed with Material.



Grass with Flower Foliage Mesh



Bush Foliage Mesh



Flower Foliage Mesh



Rock Mesh Sculpt - Zbrush



Rock Game Ready Mesh Retopoed - 2048 tris




Unreal Engine 4 - Rock Material 

This Rock Material uses world space positioning for textures so texture tiling is seamless throughout the scene. The material also uses a triplaner material setup. This allows for rapid kitbashing with a quality result. Using a triplaner technique allows for the mesh's vertex coordinates to be read in the game engine to assign textures in certain directions. In my case this made it so grass or moss was always on top of the rock no matter with direction I turned the asset. Additionally I added vertex painting controls to my Material so I could remove or add grass to the rock enabling me final say of how the material appears on the mesh.

Video Demonstration of Material functioning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aUpYsIBR-I

Top Left of Material Nodes



Bottom Left of Material Nodes



Right Side of Material Nodes



SpeedTree tree Asset - Tree 1



SpeedTree tree Asset - Tree 2



SkyBox Texture - Made in Photoshop

The scenes SkyBox contains my custom asset on top of Unreal Engine 4's default BP SkySphere which has had some of its nodes modified along with its material blend mode set to additive. I shrank the BP SkySphere in half and have my custom SkyBox on top of that.



Welsh Valley Scenes Buffer Visualization - Multiple Views



View of Terrain in Unreal Engine 4



World Space view of Terrain in Unreal Engine 4



Terrain World Machine Baked Normal Map



Terrain World Machine Baked Splat Map



Terrain Alpha Mask used to control procedural generation layout of Foliage for the entire scenes terrain



Material Setup for terrain in Unreal Engine 4 and Foliage masking.



Unfortunately I am having an issue right now with worldMachine syncing with geoglyph quad spinner so I can't show the nodes for making the terrain in WorldMachine at the moment. I will try to update this later.

Tutorial 

This tutorial goes over how to create Procedural Foliage and Grass Generation in Unreal Engine 4 in a step by step guide. The tutorial shows how I populated the Welsh Valleys scenes grass, weeds and pathway.

This is an advanced tutorial for Unreal Engine. Enjoy!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2i_GCqXe4Y

Well I really hope you enjoyed my post. Check out my website shaundavies3d.com.

If you are in the states have a great Labor Day weekend!!!!

Benvox2

Thanks for sharing, really awesome stuff! Makes me want to visit. If you are still looking for critiques; I know the UK would be a very green/lush place, but I still think a little colour variation in the foliage would be nice, such as some dead strands of grass/leaves or patches. Overall the scene is great though, are you using DFAO?

broScience

Thanks for the feedback and kind words Benvox2! I totally agree that some more foliage variation would be a great addition to the scene. Awesome critique.

I am not using distance field ambient occlusion, I forgot about that feature honestly. I am going to check that out now, thanks for reminding me. I am however using distance field global illumination along with cascade shadow maps and AO in the post process.

mrgesy

I agree with the Benvox, the grass is too dense and mono-chromatic. You could try adding some yellows to the texture or edit the material in UE4 to produce patches of yellow grass. Also it would be nice to see some dirt where grass is shorter/patchier and also smaller scattered broken rocks. 

The skybox is really nice and fits naturally with the environment. Good job!

Ged

the grass needs some variety but the scene is cool, reminds me of the peaks around snowdonia

broScience

mrgesy and Ged thanks for the feedback. I may try to go into googlemaps and look at snowdonia and see if I can get a good texture to convert into a mask for color variety. I agree the scene needs some variation in foliage and the color it spawns in.

Thanks for the feedback.